“God, Ford. You scared the hell out of me!”

“Sorry. I figured I’d scare you more if I came in the bathroom while you were in the shower.” He fisted his hand as if over the hilt of a knife, pumped it and did a fair imitation of the Psycho shower scene.

“It might’ve been worse. No Spock?”

“He wanted to go see if there were any invisible cats out back.”

“I need to get dressed. Why don’t you go sit out on the patio. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Unhappy, he thought. Irritated. And with a faint haze of discouragement. His idea would either help or make it worse. He might as well find out.

“I brought you something.”

“What? Why don’t you take it down, and I’ll…” She trailed off when he took the thin package wrapped in tabloid paper from behind his back.

She hitched the towel a little more securely between her breasts. “So, you’ve seen them.”

“Yeah. Oh, and two of your subs, my supposedly lifelong friends Matt and Brian, snuck off the job to come over and rag me about it. Punish them as you will. But meanwhile, open your present.”

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I completely underestimated the interest, the angles. And I walked straight into it by using my mother’s publicist in the first place. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“Okay, you can claim the stupid award. Open your present.” He patted the bed beside him.

She sat, stared down at the package he put in her lap.

“I didn’t use pages with any of the stories on them. We might want to make a scrapbook.”

“It’s not funny, Ford.”

“Then you’re really not going to like your present. I’ll just take it back, bury it in the backyard. Where I may come across some worms we can both eat.”

“Really not funny. You have absolutely no idea…” Temper had her ripping the paper. Then she could only stare down.

It was a slim volume, comic-book style, she supposed. The cover held a full-color drawing of her and Ford, locked in a passionate embrace. Over their heads, in what she could only call a lurid font, the title read:

THE AMOROUS ADVENTURES AND

MANY LIVES OF CILLA AND FORD

“You wrote a comic book?”

“It’s really more a very short, illustrated story. Inspired by recent events. Come on, read it.”

She couldn’t think of anything to say, not initially. The five pages he’d done in black and white, complete with dialogue balloons, narrative captions and illustrations, ranged from the ludicrous, to pornographic to brutally funny.

She kept her face expressionless-she still had some acting chops-as she read it through.

“This.” She tapped her finger on a panel depicting Ford, full monty, sweeping a naked Cilla into his arms while Spock covered his face with his paws. “I don’t think this is to scale. A certain attribute is exaggerated. ”

“It’s my attribute, and I’m the artist.”

“And do you really think I’d ever say, ‘Oh, Ford, Ford, hammer me home’?”

“Everyone’s a critic.”

“But I do like this part in the beginning, where the horny ghosts of Janet and Steve McQueen are floating over our sleeping bodies.”

“It seemed appropriate as there’s that legend of how they got it on in the pond. Plus, if I’m going to be possessed by the spirit of somebody, he’d be top of the cool scale.”

“All-time champ,” she agreed. “I also like how the paparazzo falls out of the tree while taking pictures through the bedroom window, and the little X’s in his eyes in the next panel before Spock drags him off to bury him. But my favorite, possibly, is the last panel, where all four of us are in bed smoking cigarettes with expressions of sexual gratification on our faces.”

“I like a happy ending.”

She looked up from the book and into those green eyes. “And this is your way of telling me not to take all this so seriously.”

“It’s my way of giving you another way to take it, if you want.”

She scooted back to prop herself at the head of the bed. “Let’s have a table read. I’ll be Cilla and Janet, you’re Ford and Steve.”

“Okay.” He moved back to sit beside her.

“Then, we’ll act it out.”

He grinned over at her. “Even better.”

TWENTY-FOUR

Every day brought visitors. Some she welcomed, and some she ignored. There was little she could do but ignore those who parked or stood on the shoulder of the road taking pictures of the house, the grounds, of her. She shrugged off the members of the crew who entertained themselves by posing. She couldn’t blame them for getting a kick out of it, for grabbing a portion of that fifteen minutes of fame.

Sooner or later, she told herself, the interest would die down. When she caught sight of paparazzi stalking her while she shopped for hardware or lumber, she didn’t acknowledge them. When she saw pictures of her home, of herself in the tabloids or gossip magazines, she turned her mind to other things. And when her mother’s publicist called with requests for interviews and photo layouts, Cilla firmly hung up.

She went about her business, and prayed that one of the current Hollywood crop of bad girls would do something outrageous enough to shift the attention. As July sweated its way toward August, she concentrated on the house. She had plenty to do.

“Why do you want a sink over here,” Buddy demanded, “when you’re putting a sink over there?”

“It’s a prep sink, Buddy, and I don’t honestly know why I want one.

I just do. Sink here.” She laid a fingertip on the revised, and absolutely final, drawing of her kitchen. “Dishwasher here. Refrigerator. And over here, the prep sink in the work island.”

“It’s your business.” He said it in the way, as he often did, that told her she didn’t know squat. “But I’m just saying, if you’re putting this here island in, you’re cutting into your counter space by putting a sink into it.”

“It’ll have a cutting-board top. On when I want to chop something, off when I want to wash something.”

“What?”

“Jesus, Buddy. Um, vegetables.”

He gave her his bulldog frown. “Then what’re you going to wash in the other sink?”

“The blood off my hands after I stab you to death with my screwdriver. ”

His lips twitched. “You got some weird-ass ideas.”

“Yeah? Wait for this one. I want a pot-filler faucet.”

“You’re going to have two damn sinks, and you want one of them gadgets that swings out on an arm from the wall over the stove to fill pans with water?”

“Yes, I do. Maybe I want to fill really big pots with water for pasta, or for washing my damn feet. Or for boiling the heads of cranky plumbers who argue with me. Maybe I’ve developed a faucet fetish. But I want it.”

She walked over, tapped her fist on the wall where she’d drawn a circle with an X in it with a carpenter’s pencil. “And I want it right here.”

He cast his eyes to the ceiling, as if asking God what possessed her. “Gonna have to run pipes, so we’re gonna have to cut that plaster to run ’em down, tie ’em in.”

“I know that.”

“It’s your house.”

“Yeah. It is.”

“I heard you bought another one, that old place out on Bing.”

“It looks that way.” The little flutter in the belly signaled excitement and nerves. “We don’t settle until October, but it looks that way.”

“I guess you’ll be wanting your fancy doodads in that one, too.”

“You’ll be pleased to know I plan to go more basic there.” She had to fold her lips when she caught the disappointment on his face.

“You say that now. Well, I can start the rough-in on Thursday.”

“That’d be great.”

She left him to his scowling and calculations.

The kitchen cabinets should be done in a couple weeks, she estimated, and could be stored, if necessary, while the plumbing, the wiring were roughed, inspected, finished, inspected. The plaster repaired, the painting done, the floors laid. If her countertops came in on schedule, she might have a finished kitchen, excepting the refitted appliances, by Labor Day.